Shopify not working fully in Nigeria

[peteonline]

I'm painted to write this after extensive correspondence with shopify team with no result.

Unfortunately Shopify Ecommerce sites will not open on some locations in Nigeria if you use MTN ISP. I do not know about other ISPs in Nigeria.

Shopify is not fully ready to operate in Nigeria as MTN is by far the largest ISP here with most customer base.

Surprisingly, www.shopify.com load perfectly well with same MTN ISP but will not open Shopify Ecommerce stores.

I have provided and done everything I was asked to do and now I have not got response from the Shopify team again.

I will painfully quit Shopify after all the investment made here. I will have to go use the other CMS.

[Victor]

hI @peteonline,

Thank you for reaching out and I'm sorry to hear that you've had this issue with accessing some Shopify stores. In the past few days we have been made aware of an issue with the MTN ISP, especially in Nigeria, which has seen numerous merchants and customers who use the MTN ISP be unable to access some Shopify stores. We have troubleshooted this on our end as much as we can, and recommend now that those still experiencing issues should contact MTN directly and ask for assistance. Have you spoken to your ISP about this issue yet?

Kind regards,

Victor | Shopify Social Care

[peteonline]

1. I have called MTN and they told me they never blocked any domain including Shopify. But the response is only from a Customer care rep which may not be entirely the detailed info.

2. You, Shopify, is big enough to intervene in this for the sake of your paying customers. Maybe your customers here in Nigeria is not significant, if not, I do not expect you to tell all your customers to keep calling their ISP for blocking the entire myshopify.com and its subdomains in specific locations.

3. I will like to know if there is any other thing you can do within 7 days.

[Victor]

Hi @peteonline,

Thanks for getting back in touch and I can appreciate your frustration with this. Situations where certain ISPs block Shopify stores have occurred before, not just in Nigeria but in other countries around the world (we recently had a similar problem with an ISP in Italy). In these cases, Shopify is unable to do much as the issue stems from the ISPs end, and we recommend all affected merchants and customers report the problem to the ISP to make them aware of the problem and how many people are affected. I would recommend speaking to MTN directly again to see if you can get more information on a second attempt.

Shopify stores being inaccessible in any region is not good for us, our merchants or their customers, so this is not something we ignore or decide not to act upon. I'd like to get some more information about this so I can submit this case to our technical team for review, as we are still keeping track of merchants affected by this issue. I will be reaching out over email to the email address linked to your forums account with details on next steps.

Kind regards,

Victor | Shopify Social Care

[Freshtodommot]

Hello,

We’re you able to resolve this issue. We are having the same problem and it will be a shame to have to move away from Shopify after all we’ve invested. Unfortunately, if this continues we have no choice.

[Victor]

Hi @Freshtodommot,

It would seem at this time the issue with the MTN ISP in Nigeria is ingoing, and some merchants are still reporting difficulties in accessing Shopify when connected via this ISP. As mentioned in a prior post, there is little we can do from our end and we are recommending merchants experiencing this issue to contact MTN directly to ask for support. We hope that with more correspondence from merchants, this can be resolved quicker.

Kind regards,

Victor | Shopify Social Care

[Freshtodommot]

The issue is not solely with MTN. I say this because I had people run tests and while they can watch Netflix and watch YouTube from their phones/laptops, they are not able to access myshopify.com. However, while this issue occurs, they can access www.shopify.com. The only impacted domain is myshopify.com. Can you please get on the phone and call MTN so this issue can be resolved. It is costing customers a ton of money.


MTN Enterprise contact details :

Email:ESCustomer.Service@mtn.com
Phone: + 234 803 102 1600

Thanks

[Victor]

Hi @Freshtodommot,

Our developers have investigated the issue since it was first brought to our attention in January 2020, and we took all steps we could from our end to try and resolve the problem. We have seen reports of this issue reduce since this time but there are still isolated incidents, which it would seem you are experiencing. At this point our recommendation is for affected merchants to contact MTN directly for further assistance.

Kind regards,

Victor | Shopify Social Care

[Delonext65]

This is actually disheartening as this has been pending for long.

Now i have been able to access myshopify.com with the MTN network seemlessly but cant with Airtel !.

I always get this message below

This site can’t be reached

myshopify.com took too long to respond.

Try:

• Checking the connection
• Checking the proxy and the firewall
• Running Windows Network Diagnostics

ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT

I noticed this too late as i already spent huge budget on FB ads as my customers were saying they counldnt access my website.

I investigated and realised i have been wasting money on site link that wasnt working on some network.

I tried troubleshooting myself and with shopify support but seems there is no solution.

Now i am thinking of moving to another Ecommerce platform. Its so sad as i love shopify but i got to go. :(

[Freshtodommot]

Can you pls tell us how to escalate this issue?